The Dark Arts Journal the GOTHIC and ITS FORMS
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The Dark Arts Journal THE GOTHIC AND ITS FORMS Volume 2 Issue 1 | darkartsjournal.wordpress.com | Spring 2016 P a g e | 2 The Dark Arts Journal: Vol 2.1 ISSN 2397-107X Contents Cover Art: Doorway of No Return 1 Morticia Editor’s Introduction 3 Richard Gough Thomas Giselle, ou les Wilis: Gothic possibilities in the ballet blanc 4 Jana Baró González ‘Mute and beautiful, she played with dolls … mute and beautiful 27 she killed’: Anne Rice’s Vampire Child Donna Mitchell Occupational Hazards: Nihilism and Negation in Thomas Ligotti’s 43 ‘Corporate Horror’ Rachid M’Rabty Under the Weather: Being (Un) Well in a Gothic World 68 Carey Millsap-Spears Contributors 88 P a g e | 3 Editor’s Introduction Richard Gough Thomas The Gothic is at once a mode, a genre, and a culture. The Gothic is elusive and protean. We thought to embrace that, asking the scholarly community for articles that considered “the Gothic in all its forms” and received a wide variety of responses. From a great many submissions, however, a theme became evident: the human form, and its place within the Gothic. Humanity provides, if nothing else, a frame of reference that we all understand – a nominal idea of the self that the Gothic can question or undermine. Jana Baró González opens the volume by describing the uncanny representation of the dancer in the ballet Giselle. Donna Mitchell discusses an iconic figure in Gothic popular culture: the predator trapped in a child’s body in vampire fiction. Rachid M’Rabty confronts humanity’s irrelevance in the unrestrained capitalism of Thomas Ligotti’s short fiction. Finally, Carey Millsap-Spears explores the Gothic aspects of ‘wellness’ culture, suggesting that we might read something monstrous into an obsession with ‘good health’. Producing Dark Arts requires many ‘Gothic bodies’. This volume would have been impossible without our editorial team, and the time volunteered by our peer reviewers, all of whom I would like to thank from the bottom of my dark heart. P a g e | 4 Giselle, ou les Wilis: Gothic possibilities in the ballet blanc Jana Baró González Giselle, ou les Wilis tells the story of the delicate German peasant Giselle, who dies in shock after discovering she will never be able to marry the man she loves since he is actually a duke. Two versions of the libretto exist: in the first, she dies of heartbreak – added to a literal heart condition –, in a ‘folie douce’, since ‘chez les femmes, la raison est dans le coeur; coeur blesse, tête malade’, while in the second her pain pushes her to commit suicide by stabbing herself with a sword.1 The two versions have been staged, but it is the first one that has remained more popular. In the second act Giselle’s ghost joins the wilis, a host of avenging spirits of women who died just before their weddings who now haunt and kill men; there are few images as iconic in ballet as that of Myrtha, their queen, arriving at Giselle’s grave rosemary wand in hand to summon her from the dead. However, when they trap her duke she forgives his lies and intervenes to save his life, an act of compassion that frees her soul. It is in this remarkably different second act, the ballet blanc – named after the colour scheme of the costumes – in which the audience finds ‘theatrically replicated the fantastic rupture of the apparent, ordinary surface of reality’.2 The second act of Giselle is indeed drenched in Gothic aesthetics, from the eerie, gliding movements P a g e | 5 of the ghostly wilis to the setting, a moonlit forest – a liminal, dangerous space where a lost traveller might see the dead dance. The trembling lights transform the tulle- bound corps de ballet into spectral figures as the story leaps into the fantastic, with the frenzied thirst for vengeance, sacrifice for the sake of true love and redemption as its central themes. Because of the genre’s high formality, it has been said that ‘ballet as an art form is, in fact, a superb site for observing Western rules for gendered and sexed behaviour’.3 Even if Giselle is not performed as it was in its premiere – it is Marius Petipa’s 1884 revision the one that survives on our stages – the story has not been altered much, and the movement, set and costume designs, and characters respond to 1840s conventions. In his much-discussed critique of Giselle, Evan Alderson wrote that ballet, especially if taken at face value, can reinforce ‘regressive cultural stereotypes’, as ‘it propagates socially charged imagery as a form of the beautiful’ quite overtly.4 Nonetheless, Mark Franko argued that it can be a site of resistance: Dance has served to fashion and project images of monarchy, national identity, gendered identity, racialized identity, and ritualized identity (…) Dance can absorb and retain the effects of political power as well as resist the very effects it appears to incorporate within the same gesture. This is what makes dance a potent political form of expression: it can encode norms as well as deviation from the norms in structures of parody, irony, and pastiche that appear and disappear quickly, often leaving no trace.5 P a g e | 6 If the Gothic has been read as ‘a form that serves as a barometer of socio-cultural anxieties in its exploration of the dark side of individuals, cultures, and nations – to interrogate socially dictated and institutionally entrenched attitudes and laws relating to gender roles, identities and relations’,6 then the Gothic within dance has a double potential to be a site of questioning. In a sense, Giselle, with all its Gothic content, has come to embody passion for ballet itself. Many ballets have intradiegetic dancing scenes; folk dances or royal balls are a common feature, but in Giselle the very act of dancing has a key role. The protagonist, after all, is characterised by her love for dancing, and so are the wilis. Even if dancing is read as a metaphor for sex or a wilder, unconventional heart, it is clear that the maddening, unsettling force of dancing is at the centre of the text. Thus, I mean to explore how Giselle used the Gothic to represent the limited position of women in contemporary French society and, perhaps, even offer alternatives. First shown in Paris in 1841, Giselle enthralled both audiences and critics; it codified the genre of the ballet blanc and underlined the stellar status of the many ballerinas who have danced the principal part. In its first staging, the lead parts were danced by Carlotta Grisi (Giselle), Lucien Petipa (Albrecht, the Duke) and Adèle Dumilâtre (Myrtha). The choreography was created by Jean Coralli (who also danced the part of Hilarion, Giselle’s other suitor) and Jules Perrot. The libretto was written by Jules- Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and the famous Romantic poet and critic Théophile Gautier – who was in turn inspired by Victor Hugo’s 1829 poem “Fantômes” and Henrich Heine’s 1835 De l’Allemagne. Gautier was known to lament ‘the gap between (…) the word and the body’:7 this lack of explicit textuality, which complicated the P a g e | 7 reception of the performed narrative and opened it to different interpretations, was supposed to be eased by the music: composers such as Giselle’s Adolphe Adam attempted to mimic spoken language through melody and rhythm.8 Almost a century later, Ninette de Valois confirmed its place as a classic in the United Kingdom when she asked Nicholas Sergeyev to produce it for the Vic-Wells company in the 1930s.9 As such, it has been staged to exhaustion: it has been mocked as something stereotypical and démodé in the series Flesh and Bone (Starz 2015- ongoing) and appropriated and retold from different perspectives. In Mats Ek’s 1982 revision, the wilis were substituted for nurses in a mental hospital. The Dance Theater of Harlem 1984 production, in which the story was set in a 19th century Louisiana plantation, brought new readings to the Eurocentric implications of the discipline. Its popularity has not decreased: it is part of the 2016 program for the Royal Ballet in London, and clips from rehearsals have been shared through its social network profiles, both to promote the show and to provide insight into the workings of the company for fans. P a g e | 8 Fig. 1 Carlotta Grisi dans le röle de Giselle.10 The love affair between the Gothic and ballet is not confined to revisions of Romantic ballets. Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 horror film Black Swan set his story of ambition, madness and doubling in an elite ballet company – to all appearances a claustrophobic place of constant self-surveillance, barbed relationships and discipline. Furthermore, contemporary ballet productions still draw from the Gothic: they often adapt classic Gothic texts – as the Northern Ballet did with Wuthering Heights (2002) or Dracula (2005) – or create new ones. The Royal Ballet staged Raven Girl, a dark fairy tale written by Audrey Niffenegger and choreographed by Wayne McGregor in 2013; it tells the story of a wingless, black- P a g e | 9 corseted bird-girl who struggles to gain a pair of wings. There is something of the Gothic to be found in Matthew Bourne’s popular revision of Swan Lake (1995) and in his adaptation of Edward Scissorhands (2005), but the choreographer’s love for the genre is made explicit in his Sleeping Beauty (2012), literally subtitled A Gothic Romance. In this version, the fairies have grown suspicious fangs and their eyeshadow does not quite stay in its proper place: they are vampires.